Chester CadieuxAND QuikTrip

Photos by Brandi Simons
Chester Cadieux AND QuikTrip
By Samantha Oller
[email protected]
ever mind that, next year,
QuikTrip Corp. will erect its
500th store and reach 50
years in business. For chairman and co-founder Chester
Cadieux II, the happiest day
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of his business career was when
QuikTrip achieved $0 in net worth.
That net-worth milestone—
occurring three years after Tulsa,
Okla.-based QuikTrip’s 1958 founding—is a moment that often gets lost
First Impressions: A young Chester Cadieux mans the counter behind
QuikTrip store No. 1. That first location looked similar to “Clarence Birdseye’s
original frozen-food box,” Cadieux says, complete with used equipment. His
“customer” in the photo at bottom is actually QuikTrip co-founder Burt Holmes.
Like Father,Like Son: Beyond their
shared humility—and love of a good joke—Chester
and son Chet, now QuikTrip CEO, both live and
breathe the company’s core values: Always do
what’s best for QuikTrip and never be satisfied.
in a retailer’s stampede toward turning
a profit. But it’s classic Cadieux: “Be
thankful for the small things that go
right,” he once said.“Together they add
up to overall success.”
Those small successes have added
up to the tune of $7.2 billion in annual
sales, a figure achieved in more than 10
leaps of 20% increases since 1991. This
extraordinary volume, generated today
by 487 stores in nine states, is the result
of a long-term bet: that by dedicating
itself to the happiness of the c-store
employee and setting an example for
success, QuikTrip will not only make a
difference in their lives, but also create
a quality, consistent customer experience, again and again.
Today’s billions are the winnings of
QuikTrip’s 10,000 employees. But the
person who set the process in motion
refuses to take little (if any) credit for
the growth, the quality retail offer, the
legendary customer service.
“It’s better to be lucky than smart,
it’s better to be lucky than smart—you
can put that on every page,” Chester
says during an interview with CSP at
QuikTrip headquarters.
Indeed, “humility” is a word that
comes up again and again among
friends and peers attempting to
describe Chester, along with his preference to credit success to random luck
rather than business smarts or strategy.
“Although he plays down how smart
he is and what his business acumen is,
he sees himself as being very fortunate
and being at the right place and right
time, and so he doesn’t take credit that
isn’t due to him, and sometimes he
takes less credit than he really deserves,”
says William Tabbernee, Ph.D., president of Phillips Theological Seminary,
of which Chester is chairman.
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Mascot Madness: Mr. Quikie and Lamar are
two of the more famous mascots of the QuikTrip
brand. They’ve since been joined by energy-drink
shills Dr. Dogg, Rooster Booster, Ram Jam and
Donkey Kick, and fruit-drink icon Wally.
“I don’t totally agree with him on
some of this, because one makes one’s
own luck,” Tabbernee continues.
“Somebody else in exactly the same
situation would not be able to pull
off what Chester has been able to
pull off. And some of those skills,
values he’s developed—like making sure
he’s gotten the right people in the right
place,having the highest quality of stores,
knowing exactly where to put them,close
ones if necessary—it’s not just luck.”
It makes Chester part of a breed that
management guru Jim Collins, author
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of “Built to Last” and “Good to Great,”
refers to as the “level 5 leader.” With a
combination of personal humility and
professional will, these leaders are ambitious, not for themselves but for the
company’s success. In a day of rock-star
CEOs, it’s a grace missing from many of
the business elite.
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“Chester has the kind of personality
that makes people want to do well for
him,” says Stephen Cropper, a QuikTrip
board member for seven years and retired
president and CEO of Williams Energy
Services,a division of The Williams Cos.,
Tulsa,Okla.“He’s very deliberate and very
patient.He is absolutely one of the slowest people to anger I’ve ever known.He’s
just a quiet man who, when he speaks,
people listen.”
“The values of always doing the
right thing, doing what’s right with
QuikTrip, never being satisfied, being
the best—these are not words on a
piece of paper. Chester lives these values and everything he does every day,
even his work in the community,
reflects those values,” says
Michael Johnson, a QuikTrip
board member and chief
administrative officer of The
Williams Cos. “So when employees see the consistency between what
Chester says and what the leaders say,
and what the company does, I think
they’re willing to give an extra level of
commitment and effort.”
Now with the son, Chester “Chet”
Cadieux III, at the helm, QuikTrip is
continuing the journey begun by the
father. The terrain has changed: There
are more competitors, less profits from
cigarettes and new growth opportunities from foodservice. But the companionship—the QuikTrip employee
team—and that level 5 leadership
remain true.
“Those core values and purpose of
vision are so strong that you could pull
the Cadieuxs out of it and that company is built to last,” says Sheetz.“How
many people can be committed to the
purpose of providing employees an
opportunity to grow and succeed? In
Birth of a Gasoline Marketer
onsider the fact that QuikTrip Corp. sells 1.7% of the total U.S. fuel volume, despite having only
0.002% of the industry’s sites; put another way, its 485 c-stores churn through 2.7 billion gallons
annually. It’s a level of volume that took years to build, and much experimentation to perfect.
Until 1990, QuikTrip sold its own Redline brand gasoline,
but it wasn’t in the gasoline business.
“People didn’t trust c-store gas unless it had a major’s
sign on it,” says co-founder and chairman Chester Cadieux
II. “And so we went through the thought process of saying,
are we just going to get in and be branded different in different
markets? We came out of that meeting saying, ‘We have to
be a gasoline marketer.’ ”
QuikTrip asked Stuart Pearman, a former marketing exec
with what was then Exxon Corp., to help it in its endeavor.
“You have an unusual situation where gasoline in itself
has never been a profitable venture without ancillary sales,”
says Pearman, now a QuikTrip board member. “The c-store
business is the same thing. You can’t sell what you offer inside
without gasoline and make an attractive profit,” he says, citing
declining cigarette margins. “One is dependent on the other.
That is something that everybody knows but doesn’t recognize all the time.”
As part of the push, Pearman guided the company in identifying and entering markets, and
transitioning the company culture to that of a gasoline marketer.
“The bottom line is that Chester gives me more credit than I deserve—they probably would
have gotten there anyway,” says Pearman. “Chester had made up his mind: We’re going to be
a gasoline marketer and we’re going to be the best at it. To me, his question was, ‘How do we
do this?’ And so we did it.”
The “how” involved a combination of site selection, facility layout, the relationship of gasoline
to inside sales and the competitive offering, he says. Today, the company has double-digit share
in 13 of its 15 major markets, according to Oil Price Information Service figures.
Dick Wood credits Chester and QuikTrip with showing Wawa Inc. the way on gasoline.
“For years, Chester used to tell me we did the complicated things well and we just didn’t do
the simple things,” says Wood, former president and current chairman of Wawa. “He felt we
needed to do gasoline.” In 1994, Wawa opened
its first big store, which featured lots of parking
but no gasoline; regardless, the store did well.
Then one day, after a fall Wawa board meeting,
Wood received what he calls “a classic Cadieux
letter.” It read: “Build the big store with gas. The
industry will never have seen anything like it.”
“That was it, two sentences,” says Wood,
“and that gave me the courage to say, ‘OK.’ ” In
the summer of 1996, Wawa opened its first big
store with gasoline in Millsborough, Del. Fast
forward to today, and the 560-store retailer sells 1.5 billion gallons of gasoline annually.
But QuikTrip’s petroleum strengths flow even further upstream, into the areas of sourcing
and supply. The company is a shipper of record on several pipelines, and it has terminal
agreements that allow it to buy on the stock market or on bulk markets.
“This is what major oil companies do, but they’re doing it more as a privately held entity,”
says Paul Pontrello, president and COO of Servio Retail Group LLC, Madison, Conn. “That gives
them a lot of flexibility to buy huge amounts for some great deals.” This includes the ability to
purchase via a volume commitment priced on Platts plus, or refinery plus a margin, while even
large jobbers buy at OPIS plus.
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the end, that culture is just a real competitive advantage, because it’s not
something you turn on or off.”
It’s also the reason why CSP is honored to recognize Chester Cadieux—
and QuikTrip—as the 2007 Retail
Leader of the Year.
“I’d rather be lucky than smart.”
From the very beginning, Chester was
keenly aware of his limitations. His
mother wanted him to become a doctor, and as her only child, he did try.
“I took everything but biology in
high school because I couldn’t cut a
frog up,” says Chester. “I’m just not
made to be a doctor.”
He next set his sights on engineer,but
there, too, he quickly realized his limits.
“In my senior year,I was in this advanced
math course and there were like 30 people in the class,and I was not the smartest
one in there; in fact, I was the dumbest
one in there,” he says with his characteristic modesty.“I decided I shouldn’t be
an engineer.So I took a psychological test
and it said I ought to be in sales.”
This willingness to know what he
didn’t know would later help Chester
and QuikTrip through its rise to
becoming the pre-eminent convenience
retailer in the United States. But back
in the 1950s, it just told him how to
earn a paycheck.
With sales as his charge, Chester
pushed goods to housewives door-todoor and later sold business-form printing. Then in 1958, he ran into an old
school acquaintance, Burt Holmes.
Holmes, who today is CEO of Tulsabased Leaders Life Insurance,was already
a few steps ahead of Chester in life, with
a wife,child,career in insurance and business contacts. He also had an entrepreneurial bent and a new venture in mind.
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“So he stopped me one day—we
were both wearing our hats and carrying our bags and trying to sell stuff in
insurance and printing, and he told me
he’d seen 7-Eleven, and wouldn’t this be
a great idea?”Chester recalls.“Burt had
been trying to put this drive-in grocery
store together and he was going to invest
$5,000. He had three other people who
were going to invest $2,000 each, but he
couldn’t find anyone who would leave
their job and go work in a grocery store.”
Chester, himself a budding entrepreneur, had three rules for a chosen venture: He had no money, so it had to be
low-cost.Also,“I didn’t know anything,
demolished a large hotel on the site of
that first store in preparation for building its 500th location.)
Chester and Holmes were also woefully unfamiliar with retail basics.
“Let’s talk about 1958: People don’t
know what business plans were,” says
Chester.“I did major in business, and so
we knew enough to know what our costs
were. We really didn’t know what our
gross profit would be; you didn’t have any
way of knowing because you didn’t know
exactly what you were going to sell.”
Of course, the industry was in its
infancy at the time, and it didn’t even
have a name. It just had a need to serve.
“One of my sayings—
and it’s true—is an idiot
could have gotten rich in
the convenience-store business, and a lot of us did,”
says Chester.“There was a
need for convenience.
Sheetz Inc. Supermarkets were open 8
to 8, more or less. Filling
stations pumped gas, filled your tires and
worked on your car, but they weren’t in
the food business, except maybe they
had a candy bar or a Coke machine.”
But that first QuikTrip wasn’t so
much a convenience store as a component store. It sold coffee—in a can.
It sold sandwiches—if you bought
bread and lunchmeat. It didn’t sell
much, actually.
“We were dreadfully undercapitalized,” says Chester.“We were in a panic.
So being real entrepreneurs, we said,
‘You can only go so bankrupt.’ So we
opened up a second store.”
Thanks to underwriting from QuikTrip’s wholesaler, store No. 2 had new
equipment. But its sales were even
worse than the first location. Holmes
then picked a third location in an
“[QuikTrip’s] core values and purpose
of vision are so strong that you could
pull the Cadieuxs out of it and that
company is built to last.”
Steve Sheetz
so it had to be simple,” he says.“I wanted
to be at least as smart as the people in
that business.” And because he was
soured on the cutthroat printing business, it had to have little competition.
“Well, Burt gave me this opportunity,
just gave it to me on a plate,” he says.
Chester borrowed $5,000 from his
father and, with that, became a retailer.
“The joke was if I worked nights, I got to
be president,” he says. And he did work
“nights,” or 3:30 to 11 p.m., seven days a
week, while an employee worked days.
If someone were to predict QuikTrip’s success based on that first location, he’d shake his head in pity. The
first store had all used equipment,
Chester remembers. “It looked like
Clarence Birdseye’s original frozenfood boxes.” (Recently, QuikTrip
industrial area, with low-income housing nearby. Here, the retailers decided
that emulation, rather than perspiration, was the ticket.
“We copied Git ‘n’ Go—we just
looked at their floor plan and copied it,
because they knew what they were
doing,” Chester admits. (Git ‘n’ Go was
later acquired by Kum & Go in 2004.)
They also hired a former Git‘n’ Go contractor, Billy Neal, to operate the store,
which gave Chester his first taste of hiring for experience; later in QuikTrip’s
history, he would fill his board and senior management with experts in their
fields to make up for areas where he
lacked knowledge.
That store broke even. But QuikTrip
was still losing money.
“I didn’t know if we’d make it; I hoped
we’d make it,” says Chester.“I figured my
out was, if it failed—I was 26 at the
time—that it would fail in the first two
to three years,that I had a college degree,
and been in the service, and could get a
job. On the other hand, we didn’t know
anything about what we were doing.”
Then luck—or opportunity—
stepped in. A Tulsa dairy owner asked
Holmes and Chester if they wanted to
buy a store he had originally built for
Git ‘n’ Go, which had dropped out of
the sale.“All I knew about site selection
was density of housing,” says Chester.
“And there were a lot of houses.”
That sold them. “And dumb luck,
because it started out making money. It
pretty much saved us,” says Chester.“We
started out with $16,000 paid in capital
and after a year and a half, we had a negative net worth of $26,000.But if you buy
on credit and sell for cash,somehow you
can swim when you’re drowning.”
About five years after opening its
first store, QuikTrip kept getting lucky
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but also began getting smart, learning
from its previous mistakes. The fifth
store performed OK, and the sixth store
did well. At 10 stores, the company was
catching on. Chester credits much of
this success to Holmes’ business acumen; but like all partnerships, this one
had a beginning and an end.
“I had this running joke that he was
the father of QuikTrip—which was
true—and I was the mother, and he got
me pregnant and just left me,” says
Chester,“which is a good story and gets
a laugh. But it’s kind of true—he did
leave me.” Holmes, a true entrepreneur
hungry for new projects to finance,
moved on, while QuikTrip became
Cadieux’s baby to raise.
“Leaders never accomplish great
things alone.”
While QuikTrip found its footing in the
1960s, it floundered in the 1970s. In an
attempt to grow beyond the small Tulsa
market, it entered Kansas City, Mo., and
then acquired a Wichita, Kan., chain.
After buying out the owner with no
capital, QuikTrip saw its bank loan
pulled, and Chester spent the next year
hunting for financing. Meanwhile, the
Vietnam War siphoned off employees.
After 13 years and an acquisition,
QuikTrip had grown to 120 stores and
$1 million in sales—overexpanded and
undercapitalized. It would continue to
be undercapitalized for the next 35 years.
Regardless, while some retailers might
have cashed in their chips, QuikTrip did
the only sensible thing: It took on Iowa,
entering Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
It would be understandable if selling QuikTrip had crossed Chester’s
mind, and he did get offers. But it was
never an option.
“This sounds self-serving, but for a
“I told Chet when he came
on board, ‘You have to
understand that we’re not
going to sell out. We’re in
business for our
employees.’ ”
Chester Cadieux
QuikTrip Corp.
long time, we’ve been in business for
our employees,” says Chester. “I told
Chet when he came on board, ‘You
have to understand that we’re not
going to sell out. We’re in business for
our employees.’ It would screw our
employees to sell out to somebody
who’d cut wages and do the sort of
thing people do when they buy other
people’s companies.”
That legendary focus on people
originated in the chaos of a U.S. Air
Force radar site, at the tail end of the
Korean War. Chester, second lieutenant
at the time, was in charge of nearly half
of the 330 troops on the base.
“One of the things I learned in the
Air Force was that people make all the
difference,” says Chester.“Some of these
little staff sergeants who wanted to be
in the Air Force as a career were gungho, and those were the [good] guys.
That’s when I learned about having
people you can trust and people you
can depend on.”
The tenets of QuikTrip’s employee
focus grew from that experience: Hire
right the first time, pay well, train often,
promote from within. Indeed, 11 of
QuikTrip’s 14 senior executives began in
entry-level jobs. The creed placed QuikTrip on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies
to Work For list five times in a row.
It also keeps turnover at an indus-
try low, at 17% for store managers—
compared to 23.8% for the industry,
according to the 2007 NACS State of
the Industry Report—and in the 80th
percentile for part-time employees, vs.
the 111.7% industry figure.
“Everybody says that turnover is
very expensive. I think Chester is one
of the few people who actually believed
it and made sure he had the lowest possible turnover,” says Kerley LeBoeuf,
retired NACS chairman and CEO and
former president of Little General
Stores. “He also did so much to make
sure he got the right person the first
time and trained them right.”
And there’s a cost for hiring the best.
QuikTrip prides itself on generous
wages—store managers average
$60,525—which has sometimes put it
against the official industry stance
against minimum-wage increases.
Employees also have access to a 401(k)
with 50% matching, profit sharing and
an employee-stock-option plan. But,
as Chester sees it, the investment is a
no-brainer.
“You spend $3 million to $4 million
on a c-store/gasoline operation and you
put in minimum-wage people,” he says
of typical industry practice.“It deserves
commitment, talent and drive, and
willingness to do the best you can.”
Dave McFarland, a QuikTrip store
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manager in Tulsa, is one of those highcaliber recruits.
“A lot of companies, I think, just try
to go for the bottom dollar,” says McFarland, who has been with QuikTrip for
11 years, and store manager for four.“At
QuikTrip, we kind of go to a different
way—we make sure the employees are
treated correctly and by that they come
in, they know they are going to be
treated fairly, they’ll have fun at their
jobs, and it just leads to a good attitude
and good atmosphere through the personnel. The customers can see that.
“I don’t plan on going anywhere,”
McFarland continues.“I plan on retiring at QuikTrip. Every job I had before,
I’d only been there a year; I didn’t
expect to be here 11 years. After two
years with QuikTrip, I realized this was
the place I wanted to be.”
Of course, an equally important part
of QuikTrip’s people power is Chester
himself. “This man really cares,” says
Sandi Westbrook, one of those entrylevel hires who now is CFO. As a result,
“he has an extremely high loyalty
among the people—not just to the
company, but to him personally.”
This caring nature was on display at
CSP’s October visit to QuikTrip headquarters. While there, an employee hurt
his back. Chester—a spry 74 years
old—made it his duty to help the
employee get home.
“The biggest concern that we faced
probably in my career is: What are we
going to do if Chester’s not leading?”
says Westbrook. “Will these people
work for anybody else like that? And
honestly, I don’t think they would have
worked for anybody but him.”
This being said, Chet, whom Westbrook describes as just like his dad,
“truly cares for the employees, so yes,
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there’s going to be the loyalty.”
It all comes down to the Golden Rule
and doing the right thing, even during
difficult times, says Pattye Moore, a
member of the QuikTrip board and former president of drive-thru chain Sonic
Corp., who now consults on leadership.
“These are things your mom taught you,
that at the very least you learned in
kindergarten,” she says.“But as you step
up the ladder and become more successful, become more powerful, some of
these things tend to go by the wayside.
“I wish more people would recognize you could get ahead in business
and build successful brands and companies by building up your people,” she
continues. “I think that sums up his
leadership style. And I think it’s the reason for their success.”
“Be patient and only make big
changes occasionally.”
QuikTrip exists so that employees can
grow and succeed. It’s a sense of purpose that frames the company’s
growth strategy.
“When opportunities are slowing
down to promote people at QuikTrip,
they build more stores,” says Johnson.
“I don’t know whether you can do or
forward that kind of leeway if you were
a publicly held company.”
For QuikTrip, it’s meant expanding
strategically. Whereas other retailers
“mushroom out” from a home base,
QuikTrip surveys the entire country and
homes in on those with the greatest longterm return. Part of it has to do with the
limitations of a small market such as
Tulsa.Part of it has to do with the unlimited potential of the two-tank town.
“He and his people were looking at
the whole U.S. and saying that their
vision was to be the best convenience and
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Home Sweet Home: Dave
McFarland joined QuikTrip 11 years ago in
search of a paycheck. Instead, he found a
career. Now manager of a store in Tulsa,
McFarland envisions working for the c-store
giant until he retires.
gasoline marketer in the eyes of customers and employees,” says Sheetz.“Let’s
identify those markets where people
drive the furthest distance because they
use more fuel, and let’s go in and really
cluster those stores, and get to a critical
mass. The faster you get to critical mass,
the faster you can make money.”
It’s a model that has influenced the
growth strategy of the Sheetz chain,
which traditionally has mushroomed
out. “They’ve impacted us to come
back and say … we need to really
develop the core markets, protect the
core markets—or the heritage markets
where we’re at—and not be so quick
to push the geography,” says Sheetz.
This clustering approach has other
benefits, all related to economies of scale,
according to Wood. These include
shorter stops between stores for supply
deliveries, easier transfer of employees
between stores, stretching advertising
over a greater area and solidifying the
brand in the customer’s mind.
Entering those markets—which
Chester refers to as“two-tank towns”
because of commuters’ need to fill
up twice each week to travel to and
from work, and have populations of
at least a million—are considerable
undertakings alone, considering the
In the 1960s,
groundwork. Transferring QuikTrip QuikTrip was beginning to learn from its earlier
culture requires moving current mistakes and make its stores profitable. Its new
employees into the new market to Quittin’ Time beer, introduced on the banner, was
run stores. There is also the need to one of its first forays into private label.
set up a supply chain from scratch.
It takes at least 60 stores for Quik- “I’m thinking, man, this is really scary. I
Trip to become economically viable don’t understand what’s going on there.”
in a market because of overhead. But
Regardless, QuikTrip took the two
once achieved, the bang for the buck simultaneous jumps in 1986. Which
is massive.
was a mistake, Chester says, because
“Starting a new market is tough,” they could have easily waited a year or
Chester says.“Why not get a good one two for Atlanta,“but we just, like always,
that had growth? Dallas probably went and did it,” he says. It proved a
grows a Tulsa every two years, and tough fight.
Atlanta is 110 miles east or west of
“We underestimated RaceTrac
what that metro area is. ... If a town’s greatly,” Chester admits.“We were lookbig and growing, it just gives you a ing at 7-Eleven, the people that you reclong-term place to be and work.”
ognize in your business, being there.
Then consider the fact that, twice in And RaceTrac looked like a gasoline
its history, QuikTrip has entered two operation to us, and we just didn’t
such two-tank towns at the same time: understand who they were. So you keep
St. Louis and Atlanta, and Dallas and learning these things.”
Phoenix. Here’s where strategy disapQuikTrip had to bone up on Atlanta
pears somewhat from the process.
customer motivations, geography, traf“We’re bad decision-makers,” fic flow and competition while pushChester says. “It’s the same thing that ing to turn a profit. But it learned
drove us to be undercapitalized; we kept quickly: Today, QuikTrip owns nearly
opening new stores.” St. Louis seemed 30% of Atlanta’s market share, accorda natural expansion point, being just ing to Oil Price Information Service
across the state from Kansas City. (OPIS) figures.
Atlanta, meanwhile, was being pushed
In 1999, QuikTrip encountered a
by one of QuikTrip’s real-estate experts. similar opportunity in Dallas and
“Atlanta looked like an opportunity, Phoenix.“I had great misgivings about
but it really scared me because there was Dallas just because it was so big and
an original c-store company in there with there were so many c-stores and so
100 stores or so, and then all of these many gasoline stations, and it looked
other companies had come in and built like a beachhead that we’d die on,” says
about 30 stores and quit,” says Chester, Chester. “And Phoenix, on the other
alluding to Atlanta-based RaceTrac Corp. hand, looked wonderful. And so we just
Far From Quittin’ Time:
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couldn’t help ourselves.”
Seven years later, QuikTrip has
commanded 21% of the Phoenix
market share,according to OPIS data;
Dallas has been a much tougher slog,
with the chain taking 5.8% share.
It’s a maneuver that QuikTrip
could certainly do again, Chet asserts.
“Candidly, the bigger we get, the
easier that is to do,” he says.“That was
really a big deal to go into two markets when we only had four. When we
had six and went into two, that wasn’t
quite as big a leap.” The biggest issue—
other than losing money initially—is
staffing. But,“the bigger we get, the easier it is to staff.”
Retailers in QuikTrip’s key markets
can attest to its reputation as a tough
competitor when it comes to petroleum,
and some have even accused it of selling
below cost. But its motivations are clear.
“In the end, the long-term focus in
on lowering the break-even; in the
short term, it’s about building market
share and not giving it up,” says Sheetz.
“Once they go into a market and build
a critical mass and market share, they
want to continue to grow market share
and be the No. 1 choice for customers.”
“Walk away from marginal stores.
Instead, invest what it takes to make
good stores even better.”
Beyond mastering a means to grow,
QuikTrip has helped redefine the concept of growth. The company is famous
for having shuttered as many stores as
it has opened, presenting a constantly
rejuvenated face to customers.
“I remember celebrating many years
ago when we reached the 300th store,
which was a milestone,” says board
member Stuart Pearman, a retired marketing exec for Exxon Corp. and archi-
tect of QuikTrip’s fuel strategy. (See
“The Birth of a Gasoline Marketer,”
p. 43.) “Only problem is, every time we
reached it, we got rid of one of the older
stores, so we’d go back to 299. So we
celebrated reaching 300 about three or
four different times.
“But that also speaks well for the
leadership of the company, because
while they were growing, they were also
mindful of the need to improve the
quality of the site locations,” Pearman
continues.“They never met a store that
they wouldn’t get rid of if they thought
it didn’t have the potential to live up to
the quality image they were seeking.”
In the retail business, it’s easy to focus
on the wrong numbers. “You’d meet
these guys at NACS seminars and it was,
‘How many stores have you got?’And it’s
stupid,” says Chester.“What other busi-
know immediately where to find what
they need, it helps increase store traffic.
Meanwhile,employees can easily be transferred to a different location to pitch in
for a colleague who is out sick and know
exactly how to operate the store.
In essence, each QuikTrip becomes a
retail factory, with customers and
employees so attuned to the store experience that the act of shopping and working at a QuikTrip becomes instinctive.
“And if it is instinctive, [employees]
aren’t thinking about that because it’s
just routine,” says Chet. “They’re not
scrambling, thinking about how to run
this store; they know how to run this
store. It’s like breathing to them. They
can focus on the customer instead.”
Chet, as humble, if not more so, than
his father, likes to credit the one-sizefits-all approach to QuikTrip’s inability
to handle complexity.
“I joke with Sheetz and
Wawa both,” he says.“The
Circle K’s out there, the 7Elevens—I tell them routinely, we’re not smart
enough to run your
QuikTrip Corp. stores, managing an
organization that has that
ness is measured in how many units they many different formats.We’re not smart
have? They’re measured in how much enough to do it.”
volume they run,how much money they
The unspoken truth, however, is that
make, what their net worth is. This may it’s a level of complexity that QuikTrip
be arrogant,but I’d rather have one store doesn’t have to deal with, leaving it to
that makes a quarter-million dollars a build efficiencies while other retailers
year than five that make $50,000 a year.” are building experimental concepts.
Your offer, he explains, is not the
newest, best store.“We want all of ours
to be premium,” he says.“We want the
Imagine Chester in his youth, and it’s
whole chain to look like quality.”
Consistency is a personal obsession of hard not to picture Chet. Beyond the
Chester’s, because it has such a powerful physical similarities, the flirty personeffect on QuikTrip’s most important cus- ality, the love of a good joke, father and
tomers. If customers can enter a store and son are both quick to step out of the
“After we’d been in business about
three years, we had zero net worth.
And that was the happiest day of my
whole business career.”
Chester Cadieux
“Whenever possible, QuikTrip chooses
to lead, not follow.”
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2 0 0 7
spotlight and push employees to the
front of the stage.
It’s that level 5 leader, who realizes
the success of the company isn’t all
about him, but it’s also a Cadieux
birthright. Chester has two other sons
who work for the company, one in
marketing and a stepson who serves as
a CAD/CAM operator, making QuikTrip a family investment.
That said, the Cadieuxs do not
own QuikTrip. Although Chester and
Chet are majority shareholders,
employees own almost half of the
company stock. Even when it came
time for Chester to step down, Chet
wasn’t the obvious choice.
“I didn’t think Chet would succeed
me,” says Chester.“I thought he may be
CEO at some time, but he’s 35 years
younger than I am. And I had these terrific people around me, and I thought
one of them would run the company.”
Regardless, after QuikTrip brought in
a consultant to help find Cadieux’s successor and interviewed senior management, Chet was the unexpected but
perfect candidate.
“He’s a quick study,” says Chester.
“His mother always said he was smart,
and I wasn’t so sure, until it turned out
she was right.
“He’s technologically engaged,” he
continues, earnestly.“I just could deal
with people, not with processes or
technology—didn’t understand it,
didn’t want to understand it. In fact,
I never understood anything but hiring, firing and operations. The rest of
it was black magic.”
These gifts made the transfer of power
painless for employees, many of whom
had grown up with Chester and were
emotionally invested in the company.
“Chet holds onto those core values
and purpose of the company,” Sheetz
says.“He just kind of lives it. It’s that ideal
situation because you’ve got a younger
generation coming in who’s really
plugged into technology and customers.
… So he really preserves the core and
yet he stimulates progress and has a feel
for what it takes to stimulate it.”
As chairman, Chester continues to
have a say in new initiatives and items
decided at the board level.“But he has
done a very good job of saying, ‘Chet,
this is your show,’ ” says Cropper.
“Foodservice, the car-wash initiative,
fountain resets—those have Chet’s
brand on them.”
Chet rarely gets unsolicited advice
from his dad nowadays; rather, he usually must ask for it. The most important thing his dad has taught him?“That
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it’s great people, not great ideas, that
makes a company successful,” says Chet.
“They continue to look for ways to
enhance their business model and
bring added value to employees and
customers,” says Moore of the QuikTrip board. “But they’re also very
focused on continuing to improve their
basic business, and they’re not satisfied
to say, ‘Well, let’s move on to the next
big fun venture.’ For them, the fun venture is the business they’re in.”
Very quick, very agile, very ad hoc—
that’s how CFO Westbrook would
define QuikTrip in the early days.“Now
we’re very disciplined,” she says.“We still
have the high energy, but it’s focused.
“I don’t think from our actions that
we still realize we’re big boys; that’s not
something we dwell on,” Westbrook
2 0 0 7
continues.“We’re never satisfied, we’re
always looking for something to get
better, we’re very critical of ourselves.”
Looking back over the 50 years,
Chester has much to be proud of. “It
was a great run,” he says.“I would have
been happy to have had a supermarket
and run it myself.”
“You didn’t have enough money to
start a supermarket,” Chet shoots back.
“Well I didn’t have any money to do
anything,” Chester agrees.“In 1958,when
I started this company, Burt wanted 100
stores and I thought, ‘That’s crazy.’ I
wanted 10. That’s how big I thought. …
And it just kind of got away from us.
“People ask,‘What are your hobbies?’”
he says.“Well, one of my problems is I
hate to lose and have no hand-eye coordination. But I’ve had a great run.” ■